1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of transferring products in an equally-spaced manner to a wrapping line.
The present invention is especially suitable for use in the food industry, particularly for packing food products, to which the following description refers purely by way of example.
More specifically, the present invention may be used to advantage not only for packing elongated, preferably rectangular parallelepiped food products such as snacks or similar, to which the following description refers specifically, but also, as will be seen, for packing food products of any shape, e.g. round or square.
2. Discussion of the Background
Wrapping lines for snacks or similar normally comprise a packing machine on which the snacks are loaded axially, i.e. longitudinally, and wrapped inside a tubular wrapping.
Wrapping lines of the aforementioned type normally cooperate, via a transfer device, with the output conveyor on the production line, on which conveyor the snacks are normally arranged substantially randomly in columns perpendicular to both a first direction, corresponding to the traveling direction of the output conveyor, and to the longitudinal axis of the snacks themselves, and are picked up successively by the transfer device and fed successively in a second direction substantially perpendicular to the first direction.
On known transfer devices, the snacks, initially traveling, as stated, perpendicular to the longitudinal axis and in more or less random sequence, are brought into contact with one another to form an orderly sequence consisting of a continuous column, and are then accelerated to form an orderly sequence in which they are equally spaced.
At this point, the snacks, still traveling transversely and perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, are fed successively on to a rotating device, normally consisting of a deflecting member, by which they are rotated 90.degree., so that the longitudinal axis is parallel to the traveling direction, and fed axially on to the wrapping line.
Due to the rotating device possibly affecting the spacing of the snacks, which must be accurately spaced on reaching the input to the wrapping line, the snacks downstream from the rotating device must again be compacted and equally spaced before being fed on to the wrapping line.
Consequently, in addition to subjecting the snacks to considerable stress, mainly due to the rotating device, known transfer devices of the aforementioned type are extremely cumbersome lengthwise, and to no advantage in terms of capacity in the sense that the device could also be employed as a store for compensating for any reduction in the operating speed of the wrapping line. In fact, over most of the length of known transfer devices of the above type, the snacks travel separately and parallel to the longitudinal axis, so that a relatively small number of snacks is sufficient for occupying substantially the entire path defined by the transfer device.
To at least some extent, the same also applies to known devices for transferring round or square products, which, though a 90.degree. rotating device is obviously not required, must nevertheless be repeatedly grouped, equally spaced and aligned, and also travel separately over most of the length of the transfer device, thus resulting in a drastic reduction in the operating capacity of the device.